01 December 2012

Phase
II of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi’s declaration of sweeping
dictatorial powers was completed on Thursday night. That is when the
“constituent assembly” hastily completed a draft constitution that would
enshrine sharia principles as fundamental law.

Morsi grabbed the reins with a shrewd caveat: His dictatorship would
end once the draft constitution was approved by Egyptians in a national
referendum — which is to say, once the dictatorship had served its
purpose. Nearly three months ago, in my e-book Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy
(which is about to be published in paperback), I explained that Morsi’s
agglomeration of power — which was already underway only weeks after
his election — was just a placeholder. He is an Islamic-supremacist
hardliner whose ultimate goal has always been to impose sharia, the real dictatorship.

Remember the Brotherhood’s notorious motto, which includes the
proclamation “the Koran is our law.” It is about to be. In effect, Morsi
has used the West’s democracy fetish to put a gun to his population’s
head: Either democratically approve anti-democratic sharia or accept the
sharia-compliant rule of your democratically elected Islamist despot.
Some choice.

Naturally, secularists and religious minorities are grousing. This
has the Western media, once again, in full spring-fever flush. For our
intelligentsia, the Middle East is a wonderland where Islamists are
imagined to be “moderate” (even “largely secular”!) and — to hedge their
bets, on the off chance that the Islamists turn out to be, well,
Islamists — the population is imagined to be teeming with freedom-loving
Jamal al-Madisons who crave American-style civil rights. In reality,
supremacist Islam is the predominant ideology of the region. The Muslim
Brotherhood is strong because it is the avant-garde of the Islamic
masses. Non-Islamist democrats are a decided minority.

Of course, in a place like Egypt, with its population of 80 million
people, a decided minority can easily be masqueraded as the majority.
The West’s progressive media is good at that — ignoring tea-party
throngs while lavishing coverage on five-person Occupy protests as if
they were a groundswell. But, you see, the hocus-pocus works here only
because we’ve ceded all the leading institutions of opinion to
progressives for a half-century. Conditioned to see what they’ve been
told to believe, half of our population no longer sees through the smoke
and mirrors.

In contrast, the Islamists control and otherwise intimidate Egyptian
society’s influential institutions by vigorously enforcing sharia’s
repression of discussion and dissent. The public knows the tune is
called by the likes of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s
powerhouse jurist, not by Wael Ghonim and the young, tech-savvy
progressives beloved of the New York Times. In Egypt, the
conspiracy theories run against the progressives. The public won’t be
snookered into seeing an Islamist uprising as a “democratic” upheaval.
They’ll leave that to us.

The Times and the Brotherhood-smitten Obama administration won’t tell you, but Spring Fever
will: The constitution was always the prize. That is why the Brothers
pursued it with their signature mendacity. The story goes back to the
weeks immediately after Mubarak’s fall in early 2011 — back to the most
tellingly underreported and willfully misreported event in the “Arab
Spring” saga: Egypt’s first-ever free election.

With the trillion-plus dollars U.S. taxpayers have expended to
promote “Islamic democracy” and its companion fantasy that elections
equal democracy, you’d think you might have heard a bit more about the
maiden voyage in Arabia’s most important country. But no, the story
barely registered. That is because the Islamists crushed the secular
democrats. To grasp what happened on Thursday night, you need to
understand why. That first election, zealously contested in sectarian
terms, was precisely about Egypt’s future constitution.

Technically, the referendum concerned amendments to the constitution
in effect during Mubarak’s reign. Despite the “Arab Spring” paeans you
were hearing from Washington, Egyptian democrats knew they were weak. To
have any hope of competing with the Brotherhood’s vast,
long-established, highly disciplined organization, they would need time.
So they argued that before parliamentary and presidential elections
could take place, a new constitution should be written. That would take a
while and would put voting off into the distant future. The idea was
that as long as no one had been elected yet — as long as the Islamists
could not claim a popular mandate — the democrats would be in a better
position both to influence the content of the constitution and to buy
the time necessary to build party organizations that might contest
elections effectively.

The Brothers are no fools. They realized that rapidly held elections
would favor them, and if they won big, they’d have a hammerlock on the
constituent assembly that would write the constitution. They also
grasped the disdain in which the West, under progressive regimes, holds
military governments. They’d watched how their Islamist ally, Turkey’s
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had leveraged American and
European pressure to beat down his military — the pro-Western opposition
to his anti-Western Islamic supremacism. The Brotherhood knew the U.S.
and the EU would be similarly — and self-destructively — supportive of a
call for quick elections that would pressure Egypt’s reigning military
junta to cede authority to a “democratic” civilian government.

Consequently, the Brothers insisted that parliamentary and
presidential elections could proceed promptly if the public just
approved a handful of amendments to the current constitution, with a new
constitution to be drafted afterwards.

As is its wont, the Brotherhood was deceitful about its intentions.
To arm their Western apologists and assuage those Egyptians who might
think a new government’s constitution should be in place before the new
government is elected, the Brothers swore up and down that they
understood constitutions are different from ordinary legislation. To be
legitimate, they soothingly agreed, a nation’s fundamental law must
reflect a consensus of the whole society — guaranteeing the rights of
women and religious minorities. Beyond that, though, the Islamist
campaign over the referendum portrayed secular democratic opponents of
the amendments as “enemies of Islam” and “enemies of the revolution” who
secretly supported the old regime and its Zionist allies.

When the votes were counted, it was a rout. The Brotherhood’s
amendments were adopted by a margin of 78 to 22 percent. With the
handwriting on the wall that the referendum would blow the cheery “Arab
Spring” narrative to smithereens, the Western media ignored it. Once the
numbers were in, they dismissed it. The historic vote, we were told,
was just a hyper-technical matter to determine when elections would be
scheduled — move along, nothing else to see here. But in fact, the
amendments referendum foreshadowed today’s Islamist Winter. It exactly
tracked the nearly four-to-one margin by which the Brotherhood and its
Salafist allies would swamp the secular democrats in the parliamentary
elections that followed.

The Brothers being the Brothers, they lied at each stage of the game.
In the amendments referendum, they lied about their commitment to
societal “consensus”; upon winning, they elbowed the democrats aside and
infused the draft constitution with sharia principles. When they got
their quick elections, they lied about how many seats they would seek in
parliament, again to assuage those worried about Islamist control of
the government. In going back on that commitment, they promised that
they would not field a candidate for president. But once overwhelming
control of parliament was secured, they reneged on that promise, too —
announcing the candidacy of their charismatic leader, Khairat al-Shater.

Mind you, all of that happened before you ever heard of Mohamed
Morsi. He is an afterthought: the Plan B the Brothers came up with when
Shater — Morsi’s mentor and patron — was elbowed out of the race in the
panicked military junta’s last gasp. While Morsi basks in the spotlight,
you should know that Shater is the power behind the throne because he
is the avatar of sharia. He is the author of the Brotherhood’s announced
“Islamic Renaissance” plan, which the Western media continue to ignore.
As Spring Fever recounts, however, here is how Shater
proclaimed the Brotherhood’s objective in April 2011, right after the
Islamist victory in the amendments referendum:

You all know that our main and overall mission as Muslim Brothers is
to empower God’s religion on earth, to organize our life and the lives
of the people on the basis of Islam, to establish the Nahda
[i.e., the Renaissance] of the ummah [i.e., the notional global Muslim
nation] and its civilization on the basis of Islam, and to subjugate
people to God on earth.

Morsi accidentally happened into notoriety because he is a true
believer and a faithful Shater servant. In fact, before Shater was
excluded from presidential contention, Morsi was a constant presence at
his side, introduced at rallies as an “architect” of Shater’s
“Renaissance” plan. His principal task as president has been to get a
new sharia constitution across the finish line.

That is why he claimed dictatorial powers last week: not to
aggrandize himself further but to shield the constituent assembly from
being de-commissioned by judges. Unlike Erdogan, who has ruled Turkey
for a decade, Morsi has not yet been in power long enough to change the
complexion of Egypt’s judiciary. It is still filled with Mubarak-era
appointees and, to the extent the minority secular democrats have any
toehold in Egypt, it is in the courts. So Morsi issued his “sovereign”
decree, denying the judiciary any power to invalidate the draft
constitution, as the non-Islamists have petitioned it to do. That means
the draft constitution will be submitted to the public for an up-or-down
vote.

Consistent with the Arab Spring
fable to which they continue clinging, Western commentators are
enthralled by the new round of Tahrir Square protests against Morsi’s
power grab. But they are a pale imitation of the anti-Mubarak uprising,
because the Islamists now side with the dictator. They are the zealots
who gave the original Tahrir protests their fearsome edge. Morsi is not
backing down, because he is doing what he was put there to do and he has
little to fear. He has already faced down the remnants of Mubarak’s
armed forces and replaced them with Brotherhood loyalists — a ragtag
collection of Facebook malcontents does not faze him. He also knows the
national referendum on the new constitution will go the same way as the
original referendum on constitutional amendments: Sharia will win going
away.

Deep down, the Western media know it too. Desperate to preserve
its narrative about moderate, modernizing Islamists, Reuters was quick
to suggest that the Brotherhood-dominated constituent assembly had not really
Islamized the new constitution. Sure, it provides that “principles of
sharia” are the main source of legislation, but that, the report crowed,
is the same thing the Mubarak-era constitution said — the Islamists did
not alter it. You are supposed to conclude from this that “principles
of sharia” are not as repressive as plain old “sharia” (the formulation
preferred by Salafists) would have been.

Yet, the new constitution actually goes much farther. Not only does
it add provisions that make clear “principles of sharia” means “sharia”;
it also installs the scholars of al-Azhar University as official expert
consultants on all sharia-related matters — a longtime Morsi goal.
Egypt thus becomes the Sunni version of Iran’s totalitarian regime, in
which Shiite mullahs exercise ultimate authority.

And how exactly is sharia interpreted by the scholars of al-Azhar,
whose alumni include such jihadist eminences as Sheikh Qaradawi and the
Blind Sheikh? Not to wear you out with Spring Fever, but as it outlines (with citations to the Azhar-approved, Brotherhood-certified sharia manual, Reliance of the Traveller),
they interpret it to call for: death to apostates from Islam;
“charitable” contributions to those fighting jihad (expressly defined as
“war against non-Muslims”); discrimination against women;
discrimination against non-Muslims; death to homosexuals; death to those
who spy against Muslims; death by stoning for adulterers; and so on.

It is going to be a long, cold spring.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.